Learn to Paint in oils, acrylics and watercolour.

People LOVE painting!! Everyone wants to paint and everyone wants to know how to paint. Of the thousands of students we had, very few did not want to paint. You see a painting that appeals to you, and suddenly you become inspired and fascinated by the imagery, the colour and the brushstrokes that you are presented with. You become fixated, even jealous. - does this sound familiar to you? We know exactly what you want. You want to stand in front of a canvas and blast away in a frenzy of creative bliss and absorb the sheer euphoria of wild strokes and pigment dripping from your hands, or do washes in watercolour that transforms a mundane white into a translucent vibrant sky. Or you could be the type that approach a work of art with predestined precise planning and love to spend hours on complex detail. Either way, this is what painting means to people - they enjoy colour, composition, texture and shadows that evoke emotions or stimulates their intellectual curiosity. And they wish they could do it. Well you can sit there and wish for it, or you could make it happen!

The main paint components are oil paints, acrylic paints and water colours. Others include ink, gouache, enamel and tempera. The latter three are good for mixed media, but a little restrictive for separate courses. So we add ink to water colour and comic courses as well as advanced drawing. Tempera, enamel and gouache is added to mixed media courses as well as combined media with oils, acrylics and watercolours.

First and foremost: you need to decide which painting course you want to learn. It is advisable to only choose one to start off with. Following, is a short description of the differences in all the different mediums that prevail under painting:

OILS - Oil paints are the easiest of all the painting media. This is due to its' nature in terms of wetness - oils stay wetter longer, making blending easier and mistakes can simply be wiped off with a cloth or taken off with a palette knife. Oils consist of pigment, oil and binder which affords it its' nature. Of all the mediums it is the one that has the biggest selection of techniques and application. From thinned out to buttery to wet on wet and so on with many diluents available to be mixed for different effects (diluents are the various bottles with different liquids and solutions that are sold alongside the paints). It would be advisable not to eat the ones marked cadmium as they are slightly poisonous as poor Vincent van Gogh found out - but in general too much has been made of its toxicity, although water-soluble oils are also available at a price.

ACRYLICS - Acrylics are made from pigment, binder and plastic that gives it many definitive properties, especially purity of colour and brilliance in consistency. It also dries very fast, so blending is more direct in application and time may become an issue if you wait too long - it is also difficult to remove once it has dried and if blended when tacky, may create some problematic craters. Acrylics can also be thinned down with water or its drying time can be prolonged by adding additives - which makes it a medium good for mixed media and for applying various techniques. It was the favourite medium for pop art and postmodern artwork. Acrylics can also be used as an underlayer for oils.

WATERCOLOUR paint is the most misunderstood painting medium of all. With watercolour paints, your aim is generally to use the PAPER you paint on as your white or lightening agent and not white paint - as white dulls the colour and removes its' translucency. But it is a vibrant and magnificent medium that needs to be taken from the reference of landscaping and stills and be regarded as a very modern and spontaneous medium that also has many good uses mixed with different media. Watercolour is made from pigment, binder and glycerine.

Enamel and Gouache are the only opaque painting media - meaning they cover everything completely, whereas oils, acrylics and watercolours are transparent.

All three courses include mixed media - adding different mediums to any one of them for different effects.